Emily Louise Smith dropped off the next selection coming from Lookout Books, the literary imprint of the creative writing department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

It’s “We Show What We Have Learned,” a collection of short stories by Clare Beams. A sometime contributor to Ecotone, UNCW’s literary magazine, Beams is a former sixth grade teacher who now lives with her family in Pittsburgh. Her fiction has also appeared in One Story, n+1, The Kenyon Review, The Best American Non-required Reading and other publications.

Beams’ stories tend to have a surreal, almost magic-realist quality to them, and they’ve drawn a cult following. According to Joyce Carol Oates, they’re “as if, by a rare sort of magic, Alice Munro and Shirley Jackson had conspired together to imagine a female/feminist voice for the 21st century that is wicked, sharp-eyed, wholly unpredictable and wholly engaging.”

“We Show What We Have Learned” doesn’t officially come out until Oct., 25, but you can get a preview. One of the stories, “Ailments,” has been posted on the online edition of the Kenyon Review. (To read it, click here.) For more about this author, click here.

Just a reminder: The first short story collection Lookout publishes, “Binocular Vision” by Edith Pearlman, wound up winning the National Book Critic’s Cirlce Award, the PEN/Malamud Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

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About This Blog

This is an emporium for all things literary: occasional book reviews, local book news, items about authors (mostly from the Cape Fear area but occasional visitors) and miscellaneous rants.

The usual author is Ben Steelman, feature writer and book columnist for the Star-News. He’s that shaggy, slightly smelly character you spot lurking in the back aisles of your local bookstore. Physically, he has more than a passing resemblance to Ignatius J. Reilly, hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” — some observers have noted other parallels as well.